The Fischer Family Trust sounds like such a friendly thing doesn’t it? ‘Trust’. That’s a reassuring word. And ‘Family’. Sounds great. This Fischer Family Trust must be a great thing, eh? Except the Fischer Family Trust isn’t. It is an odd, shadowy organisation which is a dominant force behind the data driven disaster in English schools. And, since I’m fond of a subverted acronym, I’m going to refer to the FFT as the FFS. This week I’m going to look at the FFS’s history and structure, and next week I’ll look at what the organisation does with the data it twists and distorts into a sense-strangling noose around education’s neck.The targets which aren't targets

For those of us who work in school, the FFS means targeting, or projections, or, well, you know, something. Senior Management in primary schools refer to FFT or Fischer Family Trust ‘targets’, by which they mean ‘the level which a given child must attain by the end of key stage 2, 3 or 4 or OFSTED/Michael Gove/the bogeyman will get us’. The FFT itself is at pains to say that its data disaster nonsense is actually an ‘estimate’, but I have yet to meet anyone in school who has much of an idea about the distinction, and most senior managers conveniently ignore the FFT’s own advice. So. FFT ‘targets/estimates’ are used to track children’s ‘progress’ (another pretty much meaningless term given the huge cake sitting below the icing a school adds to a child's educational development). You often find a child will have been allocated a level such as ‘2b’ for their writing ability at the end of Key Stage 1 (Year 2, seven years of age). This means that they are ‘secure’ ‘level 2’ according to a set of APP (Assessing Pupil Progress) criteria – which is a whole new area, and which Liz Truss, Schools Minister, seems to think has vanished from schools. If only. What the FFT actually does is to magically turn ‘assessments’ into ‘estimates’. These estimates suggest a ‘level’ which children should attain at the end of a phase of their education. And off the back of this comes a whole panoply of terrible analysis, meaningless comparisons and dreadful pressures on children, teachers, senior managers and schools.Follow the money

Before we get to a detailed look at the mess which this data creates in English education, let's have a look at the history of the FFT to see if it sheds some light on why we are where we are. Mike Fischer, of the ‘Trust’ fame, was the founder of RM plc, a company began as ‘Research Machines’ in the 1970s. It made its fortune by selling computers to schools through the 1980s and beyond, eventually floating in 1994, making Mr Fischer very rich. Mike Fischer has an interesting life story, and is somewhat of a serial entrepreneur. He has been making money from the educational establishment for a long time, and the FFT is pretty much bank-rolled by the UK government, effectively working as an unaccountable Quango. I say pretty much, since it’s almost impossible to find out very much information which is independently researched. Most information I have turned up – and trust me, I’ve looked – is PR guff of the highest order. The FFT makes a huge thing of its status as a non-profit company, as if this puts it above anything as sordid as money and profit. What this actually means is that the company has no shareholders but it can still do all the things a profit-making company does, such as enter into contracts, own stuff and pay its staff. The last set of accounts I can find are for 2012, when the company had a turn over of just under £1,000,000, although in 2006, 2007 and 2008 it was considerably higher. In fact, the company turnover in the name of The Fischer Family Trust dropped by £1,000,000 between 2008 and 2009. The organisation appears to operate under a bewildering number of subsidiaries, however, such as FFT Education Limited, Fischer Education Project Limited and FFTLive. Goodness knows how many subsidiaries there actually are; suffice to say that the FFS is not a single, easily definable entity, and trying to follow the money is not easy.The money making potential of multiple subsidiaries

In a previous life, I used to do some work for a mutual building society. With no shareholders, and no easy way to raise capital other than via savings made by ‘members’, the top brass couldn’t really justify paying themselves much more than they did. They could, however, set up new businesses which were separate to the building society, install themselves on the boards, and pay themselves for the new roles they’d created. I’m not certain that the ‘Fischer Family Trust’, the ‘FFT’, the ‘FFT Education Limited’, ‘Fischer Education Project Limited’ and ‘FFTLive’ is exactly the same, but it looks strangely familiar to my untrained eye.What does seem to be clear is that the ‘FFT’ makes its money from government handouts to do questionable things with data. This fits in with Mr Fischer’s analysis of running a business, which he lays out clearly in ‘A Valuable Beginning’. Selling a commodity – like a computer or software for it - is always risky because someone can develop a new way of manufacturing which undercuts you, or a new product which supersedes yours. A business in which you provide a service which cannot easily be replicated – like controlling and analysing data using highly personalised algorithms – is hard to undercut or supersede.

How far, how fast, how unclear?

So, looking at the bit which provides the witchcraft in schools, let’s have a look at what the company itself says it does. Firstly, it was founded in 2001, or possibly 1998, depending which arm of the octopus you’re looking at. Either way, 1998 and 2001? I remember it as if it was yesterday, because it practically was. The ‘FFT’ began to analyse school ‘performance’ data, firstly in a limited number of local authorities. Where? Who knows? They aren’t telling. Then, by 2004, a mere blink of an eye later, it becomes the manager of the National Pupil Database in England. Here the witchcraft really begins, as the FFT/Fischer Family Trust/Any number of subsidiaries start to develop ways of analysing contextual value added (CVA) information and to lump schools together into Families of Schools (FoS). Both contextual value added and Families of Schools are highly contentious measures, by the way, but let’s move on. The FFT/Fischer Family Trust/Moonies get their hands on Performance Tables in England by 2006, crunching termly data (which schools are presumably mandated to supply) and get hold of student information from ‘further and higher education’, thus getting hold of data for those in education up to 21/22 years of age… By 2010, FFT/Fischer Family Trust/the Mysterons were calculating over 250 million subject ‘estimates’ for children from 5 to 18. By 2013, the FFT was providing ‘data’ analysis for school governors too, in the ‘Governor Dashboard’, which will tell governors that certain results are ‘significant’, compare school datasets with numbers less than 100 to national figures (see my post here about this) and split children into ‘higher ability’, ‘middle ability’ and ‘lower ability’. So from a standing start, the FFT magically becomes the national data manager in next to no time. Then it starts to crunch data based on the ridiculous notion that you can compare the behaviour of particular individuals within a school with national averages as if all children somehow conform to something you can analyse scientifically. And all of this is done in a way which is far from transparent, surprising complex and extremely dubious. Next week, I’ll have a close look at the most public of the ‘FFT’ data offerings, the Governor Dashboard. In the meantime, if anyone else has any information or observations about the FFS, please comment below.

Great points about accountability, as FFT are effectively a publicly funded body we should know where the money goes.

However, as far as the misuse of estimates as targets goes I think the blame lies squarely with school management teams. After all, the FFT say clearly you shouldn't do this and the design of FFTLive was meant to stop it. Unfortunately the command and control management philosophy that presides in too many schools requires a method for saying 'Child A should achieve X (grade or level)'. This need steamrollers over the fact that there is no valid way of determining a child's potential using data.

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Icing on the Cake

24/4/2014 11:43:49 am

Thanks for this Ed. I completely agree with your observation that 'there is no valid way of determining a child's potential using data' and I'll explore this more in future posts.

As for your other point regarding schools being responsible for misuse of estimates, well, kinda sorta. But schools are forced into data nonsense by the government through OFSTED and performance tables amongst other things, and the FFT (in all its guises) is a major pusher of NEW statistical analysis. As I said above, the FFT does indeed point out that what they produce are ‘estimates’. However, given that they (presumably) employ data specialists and schools clearly don’t, I wouldn’t want to lay blame for the misuse of what the FFT produces with harassed educators, who seem to be bamboozled by slickly designed and expensive ‘analysis’ pushed by the FFT…

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John Woodhouse

28/4/2014 09:03:05 am

Keep up the good work - and more power to your elbow! The bullying, inappropriate use of FFT 'estimates' (You've all gotta get FFT D +1) is a major part of the scandalous corruption of our schools.

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Icing on the Cake

29/4/2014 08:15:45 am

Thanks, John. I'll be looking at how FFT estimates are calculated, distributed and (mis)used in schools soon. Any feedback, experiences or other knowledge from readers is most welcome...

I've been out of the game for a couple of years but I'm not aware of major changes to how estimates are calculated, which is:

The estimates show the performance of children with the same prior attainment, gender and month of birth in the most recent cohort to complete the key stage.

For FFT D that group of children is taken from the top 25% of similar schools (in terms of value added as calculated by FFT).

School similarity is based on % FSM and SEN. There are four categories. So the total sample is the top 25% of the 25% of schools that your school is in.

Finding out exactly how that's calculated and which quartile your school is in is hard. Presumably because the FFT don't want to schools to know, because those at the top end of the quartile have a (slight) advantage over those at the bottom.

Hope this helps - have tried to be concise and unjargonmental but it's hard not to slip into geekspeak in the bowels of the FFT.

Icing on the Cake

29/4/2014 04:29:46 pm

Ed,

This is extremely useful, as has all of the info you've been able to share. So the top 25% as referred to in FFT D is 'top 25% of similar schools (in terms of value added as calculated by FFT)'... I'm not sure if that is obvious from what I've read so far!

Jargon is probably necessary to understand exactly what the FFT does, so feel free to spray it about! We'll work out what exactly is they that they do to the data - eventually...

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Me?
I work in primary education and have done for ten years. I also have children
in primary school. I love teaching, but I think that school is a thin layer of icing on top of a very big cake, and that the misunderstanding of test scores is killing the love of teaching and learning.